We each lay our hope and dreams in the vessel that is our children. The child-to-become lives vivid in our minds as we plan and prepare.
A child's diagnosis with any serious illness is a jagged knife tearing this mind's eye picture to threads. The dreams recover, but always bear the seams of patient mending.
Talking to a parent whose cusp-of adulthood son or daughter carries a heavy mental health label is a glimpse of the rending knife. I struggle to disagree as he desperately clings to the idea that she is not really ill. That she will be fine with good nutrition and enough sleep. That if she is at home they can love her back to clear thinking.
He thinks I am deluded to insist she must stay in hospital. That I have been tricked by Evidence Based Medicine and Pharmaceutical Companies and teams of Psychiatrists who see disordered minds every day.
He denies her brokenness. And I understand why. The tears of the knife are sheering him and he can't bear it.
He will not be convinced. He insists I have disappointed him and failed him by not having enough faith. Not religious faith, just faith in him and in his daughter, who is unbroken. He knows she cannot bear the mark that will brand her different and break his dreams.
I write emotively of his struggle, because sitting in the room with him, face to face, was a glimpse of his grief and his wail of terror. He sat impassive and patiently pleading, but still I saw his anguish.
What would I do if my child were involuntarily in hospital, receiving strong psychotropics? What if my child were entering a world of labels and stigma and CTOs and stays in strange hospital wards?
I am scared about the answers.
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